How "The
Bad Boy Of Music" And "The Most Beautiful Girl In
The World" Catalyzed A Wireless Revolution--In 1941By Anna Couey

Today, spread
spectrum holds the potential to revolutionize wireless communications,
because it renders radio spectrum--a resource currently deemed so precious
that only the largest of corporations can afford to buy it--plentiful enough
for all of us.

Spread spectrum
is a highly efficient way of using radio waves to communicate, because
it enables multiple users to share radio frequencies at the same time,
without interfering with each other. Up until now, each radio station,
for example, has been allocated a specific frequency over which to broadcast
their programs. Since there are only so many bands of frequency within
the entire radio spectrum, frequency bands are carefully allocated by the
FCC for particular uses--such as commercial broadcasts, military communications,
police radios, ham radios, etc.

Currently the
US government licenses radio frequencies to the highest corporate bidder.
Spread spectrum stands the concept of spectrum scarcity on its head, and
just might rearrange who has access to radio waves in the future. For now,
spread-spectrum radios provide high-speed wireless access to the Internet,
with absolutely no telephone fees.

However, like
many technology inventions, spread spectrum was designed for an entirely
different purpose. The story of its birth and evolution is an epic drama
of legendary proportions: World War II, avant-garde music and Hollywood
all had a role in its creation.

At the center
of the story is a beautiful young woman, whose creativity and intelligence
led her to revolutionize communications technology into the 21st century.

The Road To
Hollywood

Today, Hedy Lamarr
lives in quiet seclusion in Florida. During World War II, however, she
was a glamorous Hollywood star, "the most beautiful girl in the world."
Her real-life story is arguably more alluring, and certainly more heroic,
than any role she played on the silver screen.

Born Hedwig Maria
Eva Kiesler in Vienna, Austria, sometime between 1913 and 1915 (history
is not definitive on this point), Lamarr came to Hollywood shortly before
World War II at the invitation of Louis B. Mayer and Otto Preminger to
work for MGM. She had already made a memorable impression on the big screen
for her revealing performance in Extase (Ecstasy), a 1933 art film that
shocked societal sensibilities of the time for its frank sensuality.

Behind the star
image lies a complex person who defies stereotypes. Lamarr married six
times and, besides being an actress, painted abstract works of art and
designed inventions. "People assume perhaps she wasn't intelligent because
she was so beautiful. But she really had a mind...she held her own with
anybody," says Peter Antheil, who remembers her visiting his parents' home
when he was a child.

In Hollywood,
the beautiful actress found success, and the world at her feet. But she
didn't forget that World War II was brewing in Europe, and she was determined
to do something about it.

Technology
And War

Lamarr had strong
personal reasons to be against the war. She had recently escaped from her
first husband, who was selling munitions to Hitler.

Fritz Mandl was
one of Europe's largest armaments manufacturers. He had become the primary
supplier of armaments to the Austrian army during World War I, when, it
later turned out, he and Austria violated the Versailles Treaty by selling
weapons to Hungary. Moreover, he appeared to be developing a reputation
for selling "bombs and bullets and airplanes to Hitler and whoever else
wanted to buy them," as Anthony Loder, Lamarr's son, describes it.

Lamarr and Mandl
married in 1933. It was not a happy marriage, at least as far as Lamarr
was concerned. Mandl was extremely possessive, and kept her "like a slave,"
she says, under the watchful eye of her maid. To the public, she was Mandl's
showpiece, dazzling his clients and the cream of Austrian society. But
Nazis were on the rise, and Lamarr had no use for them. She didn't just
sit pretty.

Mandl was conducting
research in weapons control systems. At the time, research was indicating
that radio waves were better than wire for controlling weapons such as
torpedoes. For one thing, it was hard to make a wire long enough (even
ten miles was too short) to ensure that the communications channel between
a commander and a torpedo would not break, leaving the torpedo to chart
its own course. Radio waves solved the problem of needing a physical communication
connection between commander and torpedo. But radio waves had a serious
flaw: enemies could access the same radio wave and jam it.

As Mandl's wife,
Lamarr was exposed to military technology ideas. By her own account, Mandl
kept Lamarr at his side during his business meetings, a silent witness
to technical discussions that foreshadowed World War II. Lamarr had no
formal education in military technology, but she had a mind capable of
understanding what she heard.

After four years
of marriage to Mandl, Lamarr drugged her maid and left him forever. She
made her way to London, where she came in contact with Louis B. Mayer of
MGM, who arranged for her to come to the US. On the voyage across the Atlantic,
Mayer gave her the name "Hedy Lamarr," in part inspired by the actress
Barbara LaMar, and "...for the sea!," Lamarr's son, says.

Player Piano

Lamarr met George
Antheil at a party in Hollywood, and they became friends.

"George was 5'
3" maybe, he was not very tall, but he was extremely charming--especially
with women," says composer Charles Amirkhanian, who manages the George
Antheil Archive.

Antheil had been
at the forefront of experimental music in the 1920s, part of the first
generation of artists that explored mechanical music as an expression of
industrial society. "George was one of the first people to work with the
player piano as a legitimate instrument for composed music," says Amirkhanian.
Antheil's famous "Ballet Mecanique" was written for twelve player pianos,
an airplane propeller and a symphony.

Antheil was quite
famous in Europe, and had done a lot of creative work there. In the early
1930s, he had received a Guggenheim fellowship to go to Europe. But when
Hitler began to close the German opera houses that presented modern music,
Antheil returned to the US. Not only was his own source of work threatened
(these very same institutions were among those who commissioned his compositions),
Antheil "was very angry about Hitler's influence on the arts in Europe.
He actually had to leave Europe because of Hitler, or felt he did," says
Amirkhanian.

Antheil also
emphatically opposed the Nazis. His son Peter remembers, "My father wanted
to go into the army, but he couldn't; he was too old. But he wanted to
do anything he could to help the war effort. I remember that they felt
very strongly about it, both Hedy and my father, about war, and having
to defeat the enemy."

In that context,
Lamarr told Antheil about her idea for a Secret Communications System that
could guide torpedoes to their target without being intercepted by the
enemy, by sending messages between transmitter and receiver over multiple
radio frequencies in a random pattern.

The message would
move so quickly across the radio waves that anyone tuning in to a particular
frequency would only hear a blip, and would be unable to intercept the
message.

The only problem
was how to ensure that the transmitter and receiver would stay in synchronization
as they moved through the frequencies. Lamarr thought Antheil could help
solve the synchronization problem. As a result of his musical experiments,
Antheil had a good deal of experience with sound synchronization.

He did indeed
hit on the solution for the invention to function: paper rolls perforated
with a pseudo-random pattern would delineate the frequency path. Two rolls
with the same pattern would be installed in the transmitter and receiver.
If the two rolls were started at the same time, and one stayed at the launch
point while the other was launched with the torpedo, and "if you had good
rotary stability in the motor driving the paper rolls, you'd maintain the
synchronization right on down to where the torpedo hit the ship," explains
Dr. Robert Price of Consulting in Electronics Systems. Just like the player
piano rolls in "Ballet Mecanique;" in fact, the two inventors designed
their system to use eighty-eight frequencies--exactly the number of keys
on a piano.

Patriotism
And Barriers

Lamarr and Antheil
knew they had something that could help win the war. They sent their invention
to the recently established National Inventors Council, and Antheil claimed
that Charles Kettering himself, director of the Council and research director
at General Motors, encouraged them to patent it. The two inventors worked
with an MIT electrical engineer to iron out some technical kinks, and submitted
their patent proposal in 1941. On August 11, 1942, Lamarr and Antheil were
awarded US Patent Number 2,292,387 for the Secret Communications System.
Rather than develop the patent commercially, "they gave it away to the
government for the war effort," says Peter Antheil. Despite the fact that
they stood to gain financially by holding onto the patent--and Antheil
in particular was always struggling financially--like many people in that
time, they were both committed to helping to defeat the Nazis. "It was
a totally different culture then. I can remember it even as a small child,
and it was kind of a reflection of the way people felt in those days for
George and Hedy to give the invention to the government to help win the
war with...there was a tremendous feeling of patriotism," recalls the younger
Antheil.

The Navy, however,
refused to take the Secret Communication System seriously. Technologists
questioned whether the paper rolls would hold without breaking, whether
the rotary motor that synchronized the rolls would be accurate enough,
and whether the paper rolls could be made small enough to fit inside a
torpedo.

Despite Antheil's
active lobbying and insistence that the US Navy needed the invention to
compete with Germany's sophisticated military technology, the Secret Communications
System was never used during World War II.

Antheil was convinced
that the Navy's reticence was due to an anti-cultural bias: "In our patent
Hedy and I attempted to better elucidate our mechanism by explaining that
certain parts of it worked like the fundamental mechanism of a player piano.
Here, undoubtedly, we made our mistake. The reverend and brass-headed gentlemen
in Washington who examined our invention read no further than the words
'player piano.' 'My God,' I can see them saying, 'we shall put a player
piano in a torpedo.'"

Not only was
the invention rebuffed, but so were Lamarr's efforts to contribute her
considerable technical abilities to the task of defeating Hitler. When
she offered to come to Washington, D.C. and work at the National Inventors
Council, she was told she'd be of greater service to the war effort by
remaining in Hollywood and using her star status to raise war bonds. She
did indeed raise $7 million for the war effort, but her intellectual talents
remained untapped.

From Navy
To Commerce

When the war
ended, Lamarr and Antheil put the invention behind them. It was not to
be implemented in Antheil's lifetime.

However, while
seemingly inactive, the patent was not forgotten. Electronic technologies
were beginning to develop, and in the 1950s, engineers from Sylvania Electronic
Systems Division began to experiment with the ideas in the Secret Communication
System patent, using digital components in place of the paper rolls. They
developed an electronic spread-spectrum system that handled secure communications
for the US during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. By then, the Secret
Communications System patent had expired.

It was in the
early 1960s that the term "spread spectrum" began to be used. Today it
refers to radio communications that employ cryptographic subsystems (like
the pseudo-random patterns on the Secret Communications System's paper
rolls), use a wide frequency spreading factor (much wider than typical
voice telephone communications), and are not dependent on a particular
type of tonality (such as a human voice) in the transmitting waveform.

"Hedy Lamarr
and George Antheil were the first to satisfy all three ingredients," says
Price. Their spread-spectrum technique is today called "frequency hopping"
because the transmission jumps from frequency to frequency.

Initially, spread
spectrum remained a military communications technology, and even today
"the Defense Department of the United States has a huge investment in spread
spectrum of a frequency-hopping type now, just like Hedy Lamarr's, which
protects our assets all over the world," notes Price.

In the mid-1980s,
the US military declassified spread-spectrum technology, and the commercial
sector began to develop it for consumer electronics. Today, it's an increasingly
important component of mobile telephony. CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access)
technology uses spread spectrum. Spread spectrum has proven highly useful
in cellular telephones, because its inherent encryption guarantees better
privacy for cellular phone users. The technology has also proven to be
an extremely efficient method for using radio waves. Rather than requiring
each transmission to use its own frequency, spread spectrum enables people
to simultaneously communicate over the same bands of spectrum without appreciable
interference. Thus, as more people buy cellular phones, the increasing
demand for spectrum can be accommodated by sharing the same frequencies.

For The Common
Good

Once again, spread
spectrum is in a position of potentially making a tremendous contribution
to the public good. It's not exactly what Lamarr and Antheil had in mind
when they invented the Secret Communications System, but, Anthony Loder
says, his mother is glad that she "did something that could be good and
useful for people, and for the country, and for the world."

And it has only
taken 55 years for us to realize that the unlikely collaboration of a celebrated
movie star and an avant-garde composer could possibly invent a communications
system that is still at the forefront of telecommunications technology.